The Nightmare Thief (34 page)

“And he took those kids from the twenty-first-birthday party off the beach? Why? And what does Ragnarok have to do with it?”

“That,” Tang said, “is a very good question.”

“I sense that you have the answer.”

Ferd appeared in the doorway of the break room. “Lieutenant?”

Tang turned. “Hold on a minute.”

“I heard you mention Ragnarok.”

Tang’s shoulders tightened. “Did you?”

“What’s the connection between Jo’s disappearance and Norse mythology?”

“I haven’t found any link with Norse mythology.”

Evan said, “What do you mean, Ferd?”

“Ragnarok. It’s the end of the gods. Fate, disaster. Like Gotterdammerung.”

“You know this how?”

“Online gaming. Mythological themes are big.”

Evan exchanged a glance with Tang. “Think these jokers might have a sense of irony—or destiny?”

Ferd said, “I’m going to check out a few things.”

“Let us know what you find,” Evan said.

He returned to the break room. Tang said, “If anything happened to Jo, I think he’d kill the people responsible in a Klingon murder-suicide ritual.”

Evan gestured at the onscreen photo of Dane Haugen. “What’s the rest?”

Tang crossed her arms and lowered her voice. “Haugen worked for a hedge fund in the city. Made a bazillion bucks for himself. But he was fired in disgrace. It was kept hush-hush because the fund is private. But rumor has it he had to wriggle out of lawsuits and possibly prosecution.”

“Did that cost him his bazillion bucks?”

“Haugen was forced to liquidate his positions with the firm—all the investments he was managing for his own account. Gave up his partnership, equity position, and profit sharing. He had to sell everything he owned. His house, his other house, his third house, his horses, his boats, his mistresses. Eventually he declared bankruptcy. In an industry where there’s no such thing as disgrace, Haugen came close.”

“And then?”

“He went off the radar. Maybe to lick his wounds. Maybe to work at the drive-through window at In-N-Out.”

Tang was fizzing with energy. Evan felt it.

“What’s the punch line?” she said.

“The hedge fund Haugen worked for is Reiniger Capital.”

The room seemed to brighten. Evan’s skin tingled.

She said, “This is not a straight kidnapping for ransom.”

“No,” Tang said.

Evan turned to her laptop. The search took her five minutes.

“Peter Reiniger. Founder and Chairman of Reiniger Capital. And satisfied customer of Edge Adventures.”

Edge’s Web site listed its corporate clients and included a promotional video: action footage from Edge Adventure games. Between footage of lawyers and stockbrokers racing around San Francisco hanging out of sports cars, tired executives smiled at the camera and said, “It was awesome. Thanks, Edge.”

One man in particular, craggy and imposing, said, “I’m Peter Reiniger. I always count on Edge to hone my employees’ sense of the sharpness of life.”

“Quite the recommendation.” Tang was already dialing her own phone. To a detective on the other end, she said, “I need numbers. Cell, home, office, personal assistant, dog if you got it. Name is Peter Reiniger.”

“What is Haugen’s game?” Evan said.

She couldn’t see a former multimillionaire financier simply kidnapping his ex-boss’s daughter for ransom. Why commit one of the lowest percentage crimes in the United States, when he could be back in the slop, playing the game of Money—the easiest scam in the western world? No. It made no sense.

“What is going on?” Evan said.

“Revenge.”

“And more. This guy has not switched to committing violent felonies on a whim. He’s up to something big.”

H
augen crept to the edge of a protruding rock. The whisper of twilight in the east afforded him a view of the gorge and the cascading river below. He lay prone and raised the binoculars.

Sabine slid into place next to him. “Any sign of them?”

“Not yet, but they have no other way to escape from the gorge. Keep watching.”

He panned the forested hillside. He would find them. They were exhausted, frightened, and lacking in wilderness training. The group would be as visible, and audible, as bison blundering through the trees.

“How’s Von?” he said.

“Ready to kill the first one of those ‘little shits’ he sees.”

Fifty yards behind them, the Volvo was parked off the road under the pines. In the gray twilight Von hunched in the front seat, cupping a mug of coffee.

“Will his shoulder injury allow him to hold a weapon?” Haugen said.

“He can shoot with his left hand.”

“Why did Ratner ramble to me over the walkie-talkie about a rattlesnake? Could he—”

“He was taunting you. Dane, the guy
is
a rattlesnake.”

Haugen’s skin quivered. Snakes. They meant nothing good. They led only to downfall.

He lowered the binoculars, rolled onto his back, and took a Ruger from his shoulder holster. He flipped open the cylinder, checked that it was fully loaded, and snapped it closed again with a solid click.

“Once it gets light, we’re going to get a lot more company,” she said.

“Danger is also opportunity.”

She sat up. The wind had chapped her face. Her short red hair was tucked beneath her ski mask, which she had rolled up like a watch cap.

Her expression was scathing. “The authorities will block the road. If we don’t capture Autumn before then, how will we get out of this gorge?”

His first impulse, to tell her they would go farther into the mountains and hunker down until the yokels in uniform gave up, quickly abated. His second impulse, to strike Sabine for questioning him, also abated. She was armed.

His original plan had given him sixty hours to bleed twenty million dollars from Peter Reiniger. The idiot children in Autumn’s crime spree party would not be missed until late Sunday night, when they failed to return to San Francisco. He had intended to stash them in a cabin thirty miles farther up the logging road. But that plan was blown. It had blown when Von and Friedrich shot up the clearing, and when Deputy D. V. Gilbert noticed the brass littering the ground like birdseed.

“Dane?” Sabine’s voice was a stiletto. “If the weather stays clear, they’ll send search and rescue helicopters.”

“They don’t know the kids are out here.”

“They’ll send them to look for the
deputy
.”

He rolled onto his stomach again and raised the binoculars.

“Dane. When it gets light they’ll send the CHP and search dogs and the fucking National Guard.”

“Then we’ll have to be far away when that happens.”

He swept the ravine with the binoculars. Stopped and panned back. A large animal was moving through the trees.

“They have a horse.”

Haugen adjusted the range finder on the binoculars. “Nine hundred meters, south-southwest. Maybe a hundred meters from the river.” He jumped to his feet. “Get Von. We’re going.”

 

 

Gabe paused. The forest was thick, ponderosas standing close together on the steep slope. Jo and Peyton caught up with him. They were climbing slowly and with deliberate care, progressing cautiously so as to keep Peyton’s heart rate from rising too high. The girl was pale and bent with pain. And silent—Jo didn’t know whether she had run out of complaints, or out of breath, but either way she soldiered on. The moon had set. In the east, the stars had disappeared against a sky now perfused with purple and indigo. Dawn was coming.

Gabe stumbled on a rock and caught himself. Jo threw out an arm, like a crossing guard trying to catch a kid running into the street. Her eyes were gritty. Her head was humming. Her ears and face and hands were so numb she could barely close her fingers. She was beyond tired, into the range of exhaustion where reason ebbed and clumsiness took hold. The urge to sleep, the irritability of dead fatigue, became a constant, aching drumbeat. Every step, every breath, called out for them to rest.

But they had no food. No coffee, nothing hot to warm them. She took a swallow from a water bottle and passed it over. They had little choice but to keep going.

Where had Ratner taken Autumn and Lark and Noah? Would he keep moving or stash them somewhere? Would he keep all three of them alive?

In her mind’s eye she saw Dustin, sprawled in the meadow with a hole blown in his back.

Stop that.
She had to focus on their environment, had to keep an eye on Peyton, had to keep moving.

When the trees thinned and pale light rose in front of her, at first she didn’t take it in. Then they stepped onto the logging road.

After their night in the gorge, it was like stumbling onto the Yellow Brick Road. Jo paused, overcome. Disbelieving.

Peyton said, “It’s about time. This is good, isn’t it?”

“It’s beautiful. It’s step one on our trip home,” Jo said.

The sky overhead was clear and empty. The morning was silent. Heads swiveling, alert for errant noises in the forest, they edged their way downhill around a curve until they found a vantage point on the gorge. Their breath steamed the air. Below them, the river rampaged. Clouds drifted and clung to the ridge tops and stands of pine.

The river was already subsiding. Gray-brown and choppy in the first ashen twilight, it was retreating toward its bed. Along its banks, where the gorge narrowed, tree trunks and rocks piled up in a mass of debris.

Jo stopped. “Oh no.”

Her last remaining energy drained away. A knot lodged in her throat.

The bridge had a long chunk ripped out of it.

“It’s impassable,” she said.

She felt an overwhelming heaviness. She swayed, hearing a hum in her ears. After so much time, so much effort, was this it?

“Dammit,” she said.

Gabe looked around. “There has to be another way.”

The cold seemed to pour through her damp clothes. “They have us in a pen. We’re cut off.”

“They’ve been trying to cut us off since last night. We’ve eluded them so far.” His voice was wintry. “We’ll continue to elude them. We’ll get out of here.”

He was at least as exhausted as she was, but he wasn’t ready to relent. She pressed her thumb and forefinger into the corners of her eyes. His silence punched through her.

“Have I ever let you down?” he said.

She took a breath. “Never.”

“We’re getting out of here alive.” He glanced at Peyton. “All of us.”

Jo nodded. She took his hand and squeezed.

She barely felt a vibration in her pocket. “Oh my God.”

She scrambled for her phone. “I have a signal.”

She had just received a message. Brusquely she wiped her eyes and dialed 9-1-1.
Call failed.

“No.”

She ran back up the road, trying to regain the signal. No luck. While she spun around holding her phone up, begging the sky gods to answer to her prayers, she opened the message.

It was from Evan Delaney. The first line was a name.

She scrolled through the message.

Jo’s heart swelled. She felt thrilled and amazed and grateful. How Evan had worked this out she didn’t know, but it was a lifeline, the thinnest tether and thread of hope. And it scared the hell out of her.

Gabe walked up the road to her. She held out the phone. He read the message and his face hardened.

What did this information mean? Jo’s brain felt sticky. She tried to clear her mind and put everything together.

Haugen. Sabine. Ragnarok.

Ragnarok’s phone number was in the call register on Phelps Wylie’s cell phone. So was Ruby Kyle Ratner’s. Ratner had carjacked Wylie and brought him up here. Up this road.

“Ruby Kyle Ratner—Kyle Ritter—killed Phelps Wylie,” she said.

Gabe wiped cold sweat from his forehead. “I’m not going to doubt you. But how do you figure?”

“He’s the voice on the cell phone recording. That puts him at the scene. Ratner killed Wylie and dumped him in the abandoned gold mine. And Ratner was working for Edge Adventures. This was his first gig. I’m guessing it was supposed to be a one-time deal—they hired him to play the Bad Cowboy, to ‘help’ Autumn confront her fears. Presumably they didn’t realize he was dangerous.”

They walked back toward Peyton. The light brightened in the east, above snow-dappled peaks that rose halfway to the sky.

“These other people are the hijackers. Dane and Sabine—those were names Friedrich mentioned before the Hummer crashed. I remember thinking—the Trapp Family Singers.”

She shook her head. “None of this is coincidence. Us running into the Hummer was bad timing, but it wasn’t random.”